When your dream sales job becomes a nightmare

Published: Wed, 05/11/22

May 11, 2022

TOGETHER WITH

Good morning. The stock market has hit troubled waters, but don’t think you’ll be able to use that as an excuse not to make your calls – there are still plenty of fish in the sea. For now, take a break from the turbulence with this week’s Quota, where we’ll tell you the story of automotive sales legend Joe Girard, find out how many new hires stay with their company for at least six months, and help a rep whose dream job isn’t what they expected. Let’s do this.

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

The percentage of the day that sales reps spend writing emails.

Source: TaskDrive

SALES ROUNDUP

Here’s what’s happening in the sales world this week:

An insurance salesman from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex had his life’s dream come true when he stepped onto the ice and played goalie for the Anaheim Ducks against the Dallas Stars. The 27-year-old life insurance rep had always dreamed of playing in the NHL, and was finally able to take to the net as an emergency replacement goalie for the injury-depleted Ducks. You can read the full story here.
According to a recent survey conducted by sales enablement platform Allego, only 60% of sales hires stay with a company for at least 6 months. The numbers also show that two-thirds of sales leaders say that sales positions are more complicated than they were just a year ago, and that the average onboarding process for sales hires takes 38 days and costs almost ten grand. You can read the press release here.

FEATURE

Birddogs, Pepsi, and the Law of 250: The Story of Joe Girard

Each “Best Salesman in the World” has a different set of colorful metaphors they use when explaining their secrets. Joe Girard is no exception. His claim to fame was holding the Guiness World Record for the most cars sold in one year – 1,425 – and writing the best-selling book How to Sell Anything to Anyone about the lessons he learned throughout his career. We’ve laid out a few of his most salient points below, along with their connections to his life. While there are some obvious clues that this book was written in 1977 (for instance, he talks about the power of snail mail), many of his points are still applicable today.

Work when you work. Joe puts it another way: “Don’t take long lunches or play golf when you should be working.” (Not even mini-golf?) Joe certainly didn’t take any breaks when he was working as a paperboy for the Detroit Free Press at age 11. The paper offered free cases of Pepsi to paperboys who found new subscribers, so Joe spent every waking minute knocking on doors to drum up new business. But the enterprising Girard didn’t just stop at acquiring cases of Pepsi for himself. He sold it to the kids in the neighborhood for a discounted price, effectively edging out the other vendors in the area. He used this side-hustle as a way to put more food on the table for his family.

Everyone has at least 250 friends. This is Joe’s “Law of 250.” The concept is that everyone has at least 250 people in their life important enough to come to their wedding or their funeral. So if you piss off one customer with a bad attitude or unfriendliness, you’re also losing the business of their 250 closest friends. For 1977, this seems like a bit of an exaggeration, but by today’s standards, when everybody is just one Tweet away from being canceled, it’s not a bad rule to live by.

Hunt with bird dogs. This is Joe’s version of a referral program. He would give customers his card and promise them $25 if they referred someone who became a customer. He gave out his card to auto body shops, barber shops, and credit unions. But that’s in 1960s dollars, so to account for inflation, you’d probably have to promise customers about ten times that amount. Joe claimed that one out of every three car sales he made was thanks to one of his “bird dogs.”

Get prospects to trust you. This is a given, but gaining the trust of prospects isn’t always easy. Joe was open and honest with his customers. He tried to get to know them and engage with them about things they found enjoyable – their families, their hobbies. “I believe one of the most important determining factors of a sale is ‘Does the prospect like, trust and believe me?’” he wrote in his book. “If I fail to develop these attitudes in a prospect, chances are, I’ve also failed to make the sale.”

Never let anyone tell you your record for selling cars has been broken. This one wasn’t in Girard’s book. But it was more than implied when in 2017, Ali Reda, 44, a car salesman in Dearborn, MI, beat Girard’s record for most cars sold in a single year. Reda sold 1,530 new cars, beating Girard’s record of 1,425. Instead of responding with congratulations – Reda said he learned by reading Girard’s book – Girard called his lawyers and demanded the dealership be audited, refusing to believe they were telling the truth.

“I read his book, ‘How to Sell Anything to Anybody,’ and it said it would teach you how to become the best,” Reda told USA Today in 2018. “He’s an absolute legend in the industry. Your whole career, you’re chasing his name. So now his reaction, well, it’s kind of a gut shot.”

Never meet your heroes, Ali. Let that be Girard’s final lesson.

TOGETHER WITH ZOOMINFO

It’s a spit-out-your-coffee moment for an account manager: learning that one of your clients is in final negotiations with a competitor for a product you could be upselling.

That’s where ZoomInfo’s Katelyn Boutelle found herself recently. Boutelle was digging into Scoops, a feature in ZoomInfo’s SalesOS platform that offers deal intelligence culled from proprietary research.

When the client informed Boutelle they were in the final stages of signing with a competitor, she leveraged the health of the relationship to get a last-minute pitch for ZoomInfo’s Chat feature. Instead of giving up on a deal that looked lost, Boutelle was able to swoop in at a time when the client had already involved internal stakeholders and allocated a budget to acquire a chat solution.

“Initially, it looked like a bad time, like we might have missed our chance,” she says. “But it turned out to be the perfect time, because we didn’t have to convince them they needed a chat feature or to find a budget for one, they were already there.”

How did the deal turn out? Let’s just say the conversations kept going — and that Boutelle’s story is a perfect lesson for account execs who find themselves in the same position. Read more on The Pipeline from ZoomInfo.

MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

Which famous actor worked as a door-to-door insurance salesman before he got his big break?

A. Ryan Reynolds
B. Bradley Cooper
C. Ryan Gosling
D. George Clooney

SALES FAILS

Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

A while back I was selling big enterprise tech contracts for customized software projects. I had been talking to this prospect that was referred to me by another customer. It was a whale of a deal. They were super excited during the first call. Decision maker, budget approved, had an immediate need for our services. It was a home run. After the second call he asked me to send over a contract, so I sent over our standard agreement.

He didn’t answer for over a week, which isn’t unusual, but seemed odd for this guy who was so excited about getting started right away. So I sent a follow up email and he immediately messaged me back, but the tone was entirely different. He had flipped his negotiator switch on and was super combative and started asking for a bunch of considerations and special agreements in the contract, some of which were completely absurd.

For instance, he wanted to have the legal ability to audit any internal communications regarding his project at his request, meaning our internal chat logs. He also requested the personal phone number of our CTO as well as the project manager who would be in charge of his implementation, so he could contact them at all hours of the day, and said that this was because he traveled so much that he needed someone who would be available.

I ended up spending so much time going back and forth playing telephone between him, our legal team, and my sales manager trying to get the deal done that I missed my quota for the month because this guy had me running around like a madman.

I ended up closing the deal three months later, but this guy made me miss my quota for the first time in over 8 months.

Anonymous Location withheld

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram Poll -- May 2022

WORTH A PEEK

Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity, is the second book by Charles Duhigg that we’ve recommended in this newsletter, but for good reason: it’s such a fun read! The book explores the science of productivity using real world stories, from low morale among Marine Corps recruits, to a woman who dropped out of her PhD program to become a professional poker player, Duhigg shows how ordinary people can become more productive and push the boundaries of what they can achieve. You can learn more about the book here.

ASK THE QUOTA

Want to submit a question and be featured in our advice column? Click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

Dear Quota Team,

I’m currently working for a professional sports team that’s doing pretty well. Sales are slowly but surely trickling in for me. The quota that management provided seems a little unfair and steep, especially since I had less ramp up time in the off-season than my colleagues (they started earlier in the off-season than I did) and was given very minimal training to begin with (less than a week).

I originally decided to take this job even though my gut wasn’t fully in it because I needed the money and on account of the fact that I lost my first job working for a major league sports team due to the pandemic (an accomplishment I had worked my ass off for the past 2 years to achieve). I had just moved to a new city in early 2020 and was eager and excited to start my new life working as an account executive when it was all taken away from me (something that still gets to me from time to time).

I’m about halfway paid off on my credit card debt and looking to get my own apartment once it’s all paid off (2 goals I hope to accomplish this year). I’m trying to enjoy the season, especially since our team is on a hot streak, but sometimes I don’t know if I wanna keep putting up with the stress and bullshit that comes along with working in professional sports, not to mention that the culture in our particular office is extremely lacking and toxic even WITH a winning record, something that shocks me almost everyday. If morale is down even with a winning record, I can only imagine how bad it gets with a losing one.

My current dilemma is trying to decide whether to ride out my role until the end of the season or jumping ship to a better paying sales position, where I can work closer to home, hopefully in a hybrid capacity. I’m extremely proud of the fact that I was able to interview my way back into the sports industry (I didn’t know anyone that worked with the team/didn’t get a referral) but now it seems like the dream of working in professional sports has officially ended with this new team and I think I would much rather work toward achieving financial freedom instead. Any advice, tips, or insights for me?

Unsure in California

Dear Unsure,

Your story shows that selling a product you’re passionate about isn’t always enough, especially if the company culture isn’t right, and you’re not being compensated fairly for your efforts.

It sounds like you’re disillusioned with the industry altogether, and want to refocus on making more money. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. You should stop torturing yourself going to a job you can’t stand – life is too short! We say that from experience, and you can be sure that thousands of other reps reading this can relate.

Switching jobs can be a pain, but it’s easier than waking up in the morning and dragging yourself to a place you can’t stand. Very rarely has a rep regretted leaving a job they didn’t like, though there are some exceptions when the pay is extremely high, something that clearly doesn’t apply in your case.

As far as leaving now or waiting until the end of the season, here’s what we think: it can take time to find a new role, and it makes sense to be choosy and to make sure you go to a company where you won’t have the same issues you’re having now. This is why you should start looking now. If you get an offer you can’t refuse, then put in your notice. But having money coming in while you’re on the job hunt is a great thing, and you’re still much more marketable when you’re employed than when you’re not.

Good luck – we hope you achieve all your goals and that your other dreams come true!

Quiz Answer: D – You can read the source article here.

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How did you like today's story?

Today's email was written by Ken Kupchik, Erica Furgiuele, Steve Rado, and Emily Hill.

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